Motivations & Comfort
by PippinStrange
Summary: Silas pays Klaus another little visit, and Caroline goes to his home. A tag to the episodes between Down the Rabbit Hole and New Orleans. What if Caroline and Klaus actually had a meaningful exchange about villainy, love, hate, and comfort? How would their relationship change? A look at motivation, feelings, and what is happening in the minds of Klaus and Caroline this season.


_New Text Message_

* * *

_Open_

* * *

_Klaus_

_It's happened again… please come_

_Caroline_

_Maybe._

* * *

...

It was very strange how Caroline did not feel threatened by Klaus anymore. The time for that had long past. Even if he fell out of love with her one day, there was some sort of irreversible wall that shielded her from his wrath. Others must fear Klaus—had to fear him, for their own safety. Not Caroline.

She had found him in a vulnerable place—again. She wasn't sure that she felt okay with that. C.S. Lewis once said "To love at all is to be vulnerable" but wouldn't it be better said that being vulnerable sometimes generates love? It seemed that while Klaus was at his most vulnerable, he seemed to love her all the more. When he was angry and murderous, there was a warmness that was missing. Like he was two different people.

Not that she loved him. Far from it—she hated him. She hated him so much that her eyes grew bloodshot when she thought of him, and it wasn't even the usual vampirism reaction. She hated him for driving Tyler away. She hated him for killing Tyler's mother. She hated him for the whole 'cure' thing—even if he didn't necessarily start it, he enforced, caused, and pushed everything about it. Indirectly, Caroline blamed him for Jeremy's death, Bonnie's loco voodoo, Elena's ripper mode, and basically everything that sucked. It was easy to do—if Klaus hadn't caused the problem, he probably profited from it, and that was bad enough.

"I was wondering if you'd come," Klaus mumbled. "I only texted you once."

"Silas again?" Caroline asked, tiredly, sitting on the coffee table across from the couch. Klaus lay on the couch, not making eye contact.

"Yes."

"What happened _this _time?"

"I know it's in my head," Klaus responded carefully, "But I need _you _to tell me so."

Caroline looked at him slowly, studying his lithe figure—dressed in dark jeans and a simple black shirt that looked suspiciously like a Damon shirt—sprawled out on the leather couch. He was sweating profusely, trembling, but not from heat or cold. Caroline realized the pain was not in his head.

"What makes you think it's only in your head?" Caroline asked, understandably confused. She started to reach for his hand, and hesitated.

"It's Silas," Klaus repeated, his frown deep. "He's in my head. Making me think that I can't move… I know there's no pain but…"

"You're in pain because your arms and legs are broken," Caroline said crisply. "Are you blind?"

Klaus looked down at his useless limbs, with disbelief. "I… it is an illusion."

"No. It's not. Silas is distracting you so that you don't _heal _yourself. All four of your limbs are broken. Glad I could help." Caroline began to stand, when Klaus suddenly tried to reach for her, and gasped audibly with the feelings of hot irons stabbing through the severed bones. Caroline, slowly, sat back down.

"Please. Stay." Klaus gulped, "If… if I cannot heal myself…"

"You can."

"Silas is very powerful."

"And you aren't?" scoffed Caroline. "It's very convenient for you to boast of your superiority, only to become a whimpering mess whenever someone bigger than you comes along."

"Very… well put."

"Don't compliment me," Caroline snapped. "Just tell me how I can help, so that we can get it over with, and I can get out of this house."

"Can you set a broken bone?" Klaus asked, grimacing with a spasm that swept over him. "Or pretend to?"

Caroline shook her head. "I don't think so…"

"I must be difficult for you to help a friend whom you still dislike so much," Klaus whispered, bitterly. His eyes were squinting for fear of allowing tears to slide out.

"Hate," corrected Caroline softly, feeling empathy drawn from her whether she liked it or not. "Not dislike, hate. In this case, friendship is relative. I'm trying to be your friend—but yeah. The hate is there."

"You know, hate and love are not that much different," Klaus said, with a critical glance. "Hate is just one small step towards love."

"They are very different," Caroline exclaimed. "They are opposites."

"Hate is just misplaced passion," Klaus added, his shivering growing worse. They were nearly convulsions. "If you ever should desire to redirect that passion, you know… where… to find me…"

"How did this happen?" Caroline asked, just wishing she could get to the bottom of this whole thing and then get out.

"I was visited by Silas again—or, at least—I think—it was him," Klaus slammed his head backwards onto the arm of the sofa, as if trying to force to words from himself. "And then—nothing—I can't—remember—I woke up, here. I texted—you."

"Okay, okay, shhh," Caroline tried to calm him down. She came across more tenderly than she liked, but that couldn't be helped. She put a careful hand down on his arm, the right one. It was broken at the elbow, and dangling uselessly. She picked up his wrist and maneuvered it—trying to ignore Klaus's shout—till it lay, normal-looking, across his stomach. "This arm is broken at the elbow," Caroline said, flatly. "I want you to concentrate on it. Only you can get you out of this misery, okay? Silas is _not _here, and _not _in your head. If he was here, I'd probably kick his ass."

Klaus smiled through his tearstains. He squeezed his eyes shut, gritting his teeth and breathing hard. His chest heaved—and then—a snap. The right elbow was knitted back together. He exhaled loudly with relief.

"Don't relax just yet," Caroline urged, "The next arm. It's nearly severed at the shoulder."

Klaus flexed his recently-fixed arm, testing his fingers and working the elbow back and forth. He put his hand to his hurt shoulder, shutting his eyes again and hoping—praying—willing it to heal. Nothing happened, at first.

Caroline sighed with resignation, leaning forward abruptly and pressing her hand over the wound. Klaus stiffened instantly in defense, bewildered at her close proximity.

"What are you…" he began.

"Shh!" hissed Caroline. "Just listen to me. Silas made you think you don't have any power—you do. Do you feel that hurting? Where my hand is? That's where Silas is _losing _control. You can feel the pain, and you can get rid of it. So do it."

Klaus was trying. In his efforts he was growling like an animal. He caught Caroline's hand where she laid it over his shoulder, and gripped it, but not too tightly. He didn't even notice when the torn shards of muscle and tissue knitted themselves together again, he only noticed that the searing throbbing had ceased.

"Ugh," Klaus groaned, lifting his head and struggling to sit up. Caroline helped him sit up about halfway, his broken legs lying crookedly across the couch. "Somehow—we will overpower Silas—I'm going to make him pay for this. My suffering deserves his suffering in turn."

"You just don't change, do you?" Caroline said disappointedly. "You'll always be the villain—even when there are _awful _beings like _Silas _around, you still manage to sport the horns and the pitchfork and look just as bad. Which doesn't make any sense to me—you ought to seem like an angel when there are people like Silas around ruining everyone's lives…" she paused, and thought of poor Jeremy. "And families."

"I _know _I'm the villain," Klaus snarled.

"Do you? And you know all these awful things that you do are _wrong?_"

"I know—I know they're _wrong _by your standards—I know! Killing Tyler's mother—a mistake—yes, and wrong," Klaus grew agitated. It was that vulnerable place again—more than him just being incapable of physical movement. It was an emotional vulnerability that she didn't know how to deal with. "The difference with me, Caroline," Klaus said. "Is that I hate what I do more than I hate myself for doing them."

Caroline hated the way he said her name. It wasn't a mispronunciation, necessarily—but the enunciation made it seem like he was spelling it with a K. Same sound, different meaning. And she'd rather not share any letters with him if it could be helped.

"What do you mean?" Caroline tried to focus on the importance of this conversation. If there was any sort of redemption possible, she didn't want to miss the opportunity by being petty about how possessive her name sounded in his mouth.

"I'm sure if I could hate myself enough, I could stop doing awful things," Klaus explained, reaching down and trying to touch his shattered kneecap. The knee was healing—slowly but surely—and he left it alone, satisfied. "But I won't," he added, stubbornly.

"It's all very well to complain," Caroline sniffed disdainfully. "But it's one thing to expect me to feel sorry for you because of the bad things that _you _do."

"This is lovely to hear coming from the one who just slaughtered twelve witches."

Caroline stood up so quickly, she disturbed a sheaf of papers on a desk across the room. "I don't need that from you. I _don't. _You asked me if I wanted comforting and then walked away, mocking me in your own sad little world. You had an opportunity to prove friendship and—again—showed that you are too _stubborn _to show any decency."

"You may find it interesting to know that half of what I do isn't to try and purposefully hurt others," Klaus replied coldly.

"Yeah, your _intentional _backstabbing is only a fifty-fifty ratio. Congratulations," Caroline tossed back, heatedly. "What's the reason, then?"

"You're a smart girl," Klaus said condescendingly. "You know that a painful past will often poison someone's future. The pain, regret, rejection, fear—everything you've ever loathed early in life will haunt you—our pasts bleed into our futures. We cannot stop them. What we've endured will follow us—entrap us—cause us to act in ways that we swore we never would again because its disappointing truth is all we know."

His last broken leg, the one ripped clean through the femur, was closing up with the bone now intact. The jeans, however, stayed ripped and bloody.

"So your point is, you're still lashing out and getting revenge for bad things that happened—like—hundreds of years ago?" Caroline looked down at his leg, lightly noting that with all four limbs available to him, he was four times as dangerous. But she wasn't worried.

"The real question is—what have I to look _forward _too?" Klaus asked. "Nothing. If everything—my past, my future—if it is all broken, what have I to look for in accountability? I've never let anyone tell me what to do before. I've severed all person's help who would even be interested in the job."

"Maybe because you'd probably just kill someone who tried to keep you on the straight and narrow," Caroline pointed out unsympathetically.

"The only thing that makes me _feel _anything," Klaus began, but seemed to change his mind mid-sentence. "I commit the sins that will never make me worth loving. For I know, then, that I'll never be disappointed. Again."

Caroline sat down again, slowly, the coffee table creaking and a magazine slipping off to one side. "As long as you're unlovable, you're protecting your heart," she said, her eyes boring into Klaus's. "So you _do _have one."

Klaus was, for once, silent.

"It might be black and rotten, but you do have one." Caroline continued. "The worst part is, you don't have your humanity turned off—at least, then, you might have a legitimate excuse for behaving like a psycho. But the problem is, you _do _have your humanity, but it is the worst humanity I've ever seen. You're completely aware of the awful things you do and if you had any shred of a working heart, you'd stop doing them."

"And as you've discovered in the woods with Bonnie, that is not always so simple…"

"Stop bringing it up, _stop it. _I am nothing like you. Nothing." Caroline's eyes blazed. "It was—an accident. I just wanted to save Bonnie. Just Bonnie." The anger died, and unbidden tears replaced it. "We've been best friends forever, you know. I love her so much. I wanted forever to last a little longer."

"Funny how it works, committing murder for the sake of love," Klaus said, coldly.

"Why did I even come here?" Caroline asked, more to herself than Klaus. She rested her elbows on her knees and hid her face in her hands, overcome, for a moment, by the memories of the witches collapsing—one, by one, by one. "I should have let you lie here and suffer," she cried. "If there's anything you know how to do, it's how to make others suffer around you. And what's your excuse? Not wanting to be disappointed because people hating you is the only consistent thing in your life? That's bull!" Caroline was sobbing now, the big gulping tears she tried never to let out, hysterical to the point of it almost sounding like a laugh. "I just _helped _you. God knows why I do it! I keep telling myself you can be saved—but you've done nothing to show you're worth the effort. Every time I help you, you mock me, belittle me, and make me feel worse than ever."

"I apologize, Caroline," Klaus said, softly.

"What?"

"I apologize."

"Go on. Where's the rest? 'I apologize for being not being perfect enough for you, you high-maintenance little bitch'? I know how these go. Go on!"

"I am _sorry,_ Caroline," he said her name in that way again. The way that made her want to change her name and follow Tyler into the unknown regions of the world.

"Sorry for _what?_" Caroline snapped sarcastically.

"I am sorry I have caused you pain, and I truly mean that," Klaus shifted his legs to the floor, sitting directly in front of Caroline, so that their knees were pressed against each other. He took one of her hands in his own, and used to the other to wipe tears from her cheeks. Caroline froze the way a small animal does when caught in the gaze of a predator.

"You came here and helped when I asked," he said slowly, drawing one thumb under her eyes and taking care to not smudge the mascara. "And in turn, I treated you terribly, when you deserve my gratitude. It seems my worst fault is not learning from my mistakes—for it seems to me, we've had conversations like this before."

"Many," Caroline shot back, but the fire had gone out of it. She slowly pushed Klaus's hand away from her face, but did not release the other. For some odd reason, she felt resigned to his hand-holding the way you'd sigh and let someone put a band-aid over a small scratch that you weren't going to bother with. She hung her head, and took a shuddering breath. Her mind began a downward spiral with Klaus's reminders of the witches. _I killed them. I killed them. I killed them. Mothers, daughters, cousins, brothers, sisters, families of people I don't know… and they're dead. Because of me. _Caroline wondered if Klaus ever thought in such a way, whenever he killed someone she loved. It was agony. She didn't even think about his presence being here, and now—she was far away. Standing in the clearing and watching them fall, and feeling the guilt overwhelm her with a dead weight on her chest once more.

"Caroline, Caroline," Klaus soothed, his knee between her legs as he leaned forward. He wrapped his arms around her, one hand forcibly pressing her head into his shoulder, where she sobbed, child-like, into the sleeve.

Caroline tried, so very hard, to keep up her anger with him long enough to insult him through her shuddering tears. "You—get off—on this—don't you?" she cried. "As long as—I'm as bad as you—you _like _me!"

"Just shut up," Klaus said sternly. "Remember what I told you about misdirected passions? I feel that there is plenty of anger inside of you, and it's not _all _for me." He stroked her blond hair and tried to ignore how soft it was. "There is plenty for yourself. I want you to get rid of it—here, and now. You have a lifetime—hundreds of them—to live, and shouldn't feel guilty for the whole of it."

"I will—always—feel—guilty," Caroline had her own arms pressed to her chest, not wanting to be a complete participant in Klaus's comfort. She was willing to be held, but nothing more. Though in her loneliness and inner cry for sanctuary—and for someone to tell her _it's all right—_she felt tempted to wrap her arms around Klaus and hold him back. Not for him, though, for herself. She'd never acknowledge that he wanted her to relax in his hold, but she would readily admit her own selfish desire to be hugged. It didn't really matter who did it, as long as it happened. At this rate, she'd even pick Klaus's embrace over Elena's.

"You are strong," Klaus whispered. "And you can move on."

Caroline pulled away. "I—I need to go."

"You're in no state to go anywhere." Klaus stood up and walked, with a small limp, to a small end-table on the far wall. Caroline didn't notice how warm and home-like the room had felt before. The dark walls and old paintings seemed far too classical for the monster living within them. Klaus was pouring a drink into two crystal tumblers. He walked purposefully back, the limp now disintegrating. He handed one drink to Caroline and kept one for himself.

"I really do need to leave," Caroline sipped the drink. It was warm and bit with a citrusy sting at the back of her throat. "I can't be here anymore. It's… exhausting." With a sigh, she downed the drink in four more gulps, and felt heat spread from the base of her skull to her belly.

Klaus stood beside her, as if debating about whether to sit in his original place on the couch or beside her on the coffee table. "I'll see you out," he finally said, holding out his hand. Caroline put her empty glass on the table and ignored his hand. She stood up and began her way out of the room, Klaus right beside her, hand pressed to the small of her back like an annoying prom date.

"Thank-you for coming to help me," he said sincerely, opening the front door. It seemed terribly formal. _Acting like prince Charming isn't going to help improve your image, _Caroline thought bitingly. _If you aren't genuine it doesn't matter what you say or do._

"You're welcome," Caroline said back, politely. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the hat stand, and gasped embarrassingly, wiping at her cheeks and drawing a finger under her eyes.

"You look fine," Klaus said.

"No I _don't! _Stop lying!" Caroline exclaimed. Her protest was cut off with a hug. Klaus embraced her tightly, and something in his body language felt very desperate. As if he were clinging to floating debris that would keep him from drowning.

Reluctantly, Caroline hugged him back, slowly snaking her arms around his waist and patting his back awkwardly. His shoulders stiffened a little at her touch. It was surprising. She felt nice, as he always thought she would.

Then they parted, and he was opening the door, and she was on the porch.

"Goodnight, Caroline," he said. _Her name again. It didn't sound right from him. _

"Goodnight, Klaus."

And the door was shut.

...

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**Please review ! :)**


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